Lawrence Banks

Lawrence Banks obtained his PhD degree in 1984 in Microbiology from the University of Leeds. He performed post-doctoral work at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in London, where he developed his interests in human papillomaviruses. In 1990, he moved to Trieste to the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), an international intergovernmental organization dedicated to advanced research and training with special regard to the needs of the developing world. He is currently Senior Scientist and Head of the Tumour Virology Laboratory. The laboratory has made major contributions to understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying human papillomavirus-induced malignancy and, more recently, has focused on the roles of cell polarity regulators in the development of cervical cancer.

Patrick O Humbert

The research career of Dr Patrick O Humbert has been focused on understanding the molecular basis of disease and development. In 1992, Dr Humbert was awarded a BSc in Biochemistry and Pharmacology at the University of Western Australia (Perth, Australia). He then joined the Molecular Biology Unit of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (Melbourne, Australia) as a postgraduate student under Drs Lynn Corcoran and Jerry Adams where he used genetically engineered mouse models to make several important contributions to the understanding of the transcriptional regulation of lymphocyte development and function. To pursue his interests in the use of mouse models in cancer research, Dr Humbert joined the laboratory of Dr Jacqueline Lees at the MIT Center for Cancer Research (Cambridge, USA), first as an Anna Fuller Fellow in Molecular Oncology and then as a MERCK Pharmaceutical Fellow. His generation and initial characterization of E2F gene-targeted mouse strains led to key advances in the mammalian cell cycle field. In 2000, Dr Humbert returned to Australia to set up his own independent research program in the Research Division of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Melbourne, Australia). In 2001, Dr Humbert was awarded a Special Fellowship from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America and he is now an RD Wright Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. The major focus of Dr Humbert's laboratory is the study of the requirement for cell polarity in stem cell function, organ formation and tumour suppression.